- Joined
- Dec 22, 2003
- Messages
- 36,688
Actually - it means you can say whatever you like - from "i think all niggers must die" to "I think gay people should be allowed to get married" without fear of criminalisation.
It means exactly that. If people disagree then they do not believe in free speech - they believe in some level of control over what is allowed to be said.
HOWEVER - it doesn't exist in a vaccum - it exists with personal responsibility. If I say "all niggers must die" and someone goes and kills a black person - which is illegal - then they should be imprisoned for their action. However - if I say "gay people should be allowed to get married" I should not be imprisoned for that, nor should the gay person who gets married - where in some countries they would. Like Saudi, where they'd be killed.
Codified free speech + personal responsibility is the ONLY protection we have for minority, unpopular viewpoints to be expressed - right or wrong (which is why I chose "hate niggers" and "gay people can get married").
The reason why right or wrong is important is because you cannot legislate - it's literally impossible to do so - without criminalising things that shouldn't be criminalised. So the only solution is to allow the wrong to be said, so we can protect the right.
That is free speech. Anything else isn't actually freedom of speech. I think the majority of humans don't actually believe in freedom of speech - because they cannot tolerate the wrong and want it banned - and therefore fall into the inescapable trap - before tying themselves in knots trying to define what is hate speech and criminalising people who shouldn't be criminalised.
(This is why I think the US constitution is one of humanity's greatest achievements - and it's constantly under threat from around the world. It's largely the reason America is seen to be "free". Unlike us in Blighty.)
I agree. I've spoken about this at length before.
If "speech" (which is protected from government censorship - and that includes newspapers and books - what you print, not just what you say in the street) has moved away from books and newspapers and into the realm of the internet (which the founding fathers could never have forseen) then the laws that govern need to be amended to explicitly cover the new platforms.
If 90% of speech is governed by corporates then 90% of speech is no longer free.
Yes, right now it's the legal position that Corporations can censor speech. This is not compatible with the spirit of the US Constitution - and the situation we have now is that we've got a new and very real "government of speech".
If you have the ability to shut down discourse then you're the de-facto governor of that discourse. So we now have a situation of the majority of public discourse no longer constitutionally-protected and governed by corporations so we don't even have democratic oversight.
It's infinitely preferable that the US Government has the right to censor speech than corporations - because if we don't like the rules that the Government makes we can vote them out. We can't do that with Facebook or Twitter - and they will make rules based on how much profit they make - hence censoring perfectly legitimate discourse in countries that wish to oppress people just so their platforms (and therefor profits) don't get shut down in those markets.
Free speech should cover Facebook, twatter and google. They're the mediums the majority now use to communicate because they're more efficient than books or newspapers (and don't forget newspapers were the easiest way to influence the biggest number of minds on the planet until the internet came along).
As it is, we've got a number of corporations that have turned off the President of the United States - and no matter how big a douche he is (and he is a massive douche) - that means that those corporations are in charge of what the President says.
If they're in charge of what the President says, then the free speech legislation is currently failing to protect Joe Public - and that's the whole point. Freedom of speech is there to protect you and me.
